Tolkien Reread Addendum: Tom Bombadil is a Merry Old Fellow

One of my goals with The Great Tolkien Reread is to highlight the breadth and vitality of the Tolkien fan art community. Fan art is a fascinating phenomenon, straddling the commercial sphere and the gift economy, and ranging from photorealistic recreation of the original work, to highly personal and stylized interpretations. In the case of Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings specifically, the boundaries between what is fan art and what is the original work were blurry from the outset. Tolkien essentially conceived of Middle Earth as a multimedia work from day one, designing maps, drawing illustrations, and composing music for the various poems and songs that appear in the books (one could even argue that his philological work in inventing the languages of Middle Earth is a different sort of media to his fictional writing). And, from day one, he had collaborators. The maps were mostly drawn by his son (and later editor) Christopher. The art of Alan Lee and John Howe defined the books’ world in readers’ minds, and was a major inspiration for production design, costuming, and prop construction of the Peter Jackson movies. At the same time, there is a large community of semi- or even fully professional Tolkienalia artists, who are drawing their own art or making their own music inspired by Tolkien’s work.

Over the course of the Tolkien Reread series, I’m planning to publish several ancillary posts like this one, that show off how much creativity and originality there is in these spaces—but also, how porous the boundary between official and unofficial art can sometimes be. For our first foray, our focus is going to be on music. I am an extremely unmusical person, and one difficulty I’ve always had with Tolkien’s writing is being able to imagine the poems in his books as sung work. So during this reread, I’ve made a point of seeking out musical adaptations of the poems and songs I’ve encountered in each chapter. In the chapter “In the House of Tom Bombadil”, the title character’s song—which he sings all the time, peppers into his speech, and teaches the hobbits as a means of calling him to their aid—has always baffled me. This is a song that canonically calls people back from the dead. It should be an irresistible earworm, an absolute bop, and yet I’ve never been able to make the lyrics sound anything but awkward and cumbersome in my head. The versions I’ve found online haven’t fully alleviated this difficulty, but they’re a fascinating showcase of different attempts at the problem.

First up, we have the Professor itself. There are recordings online of Tolkien singing several of his songs (see, for example, “Chip the glasses and crack the plates” from The Hobbit). Tom Bombadil’s song isn’t one of them, but the invaluable resource Tolkien Gateway has a recording of him reading it that gives you a sense of how he imagined its scansion and meter (and also, why it is a hard song to set to music).

Until fairly recently, the most common interpretation of Tom Bombadil’s song was by the group Tolkien Ensemble, sung by Peter Hall. Their debut album, An Evening in Rivendell (1997), includes this version of the song. Its chief virtue, if you ask me, is that it’s probably very accurate to what Tolkien imagined. It tracks with folksiness of the character from the novel, and reminds you that it’s this part of the novel that so attracted the hippie crowd in the 60s and 70s. But frankly, if I wanted an auditory example of why Tom Bombadil does not work for me, I think I would have to look no further than this version of the song.

These days, of course, if you search for Tom Bombadil’s song on YouTube the most popular version you’ll find, by some margin, will be from the television series The Rings of Power, where the character, played by Rory Kinnear, appeared in the second season. Composed and sung by Rufus Wainwright and produced by famed soundtrack impresario Bear McCreary, it is to my mind a more satisfying version of the song—it’s catchy, for one thing, and feels believably like a country song that people could just fall into mid-conversation, even with the lyrics’ complexity. But it’s also, and not unlike the show it appeared in, rather sleepy. I don’t think I believe that this is a song that could reach people on the brink of death and despair. It encapsulates the fear that Rings of Power palpably had about making Tom anywhere near as weird and outrageous as he was in the books.

Both of these versions of the song sit somewhere on the range between approved by the estate to fully professional. As The Lord of the Rings has become a commercial empire, these sorts of productions have tended to crowd out all other versions (I dare you to find a version of “Far Over the Misty Mountains Cold” that is not the one from the first Hobbit movie or a version of it; seriously, if you find one, let me know). So I was very lucky to find this version of Tom Bombadil’s song that lands at the exact opposite end of the professionalism scale. Posted in 2021 by Backalley Recordstore—a user I have not been able to find any information about—it is, first and foremost, a reminder that our use of the term “professionalism” in this discussion has nothing to do with skill and training (in fact one of the things that’s notable about this version of the song is how many instruments are being played by the same person). And it’s a wonderful example of how talented fan artists can take someone else’s work and bring their own distinctiveness to it. Finally, it is a straight up banger. Do I believe that Tolkien could have ever imagined this version of the song, or that the character from the book could have sung it? Of course not. But it’s the first time that a version of this song does for me what the book tells us that it does for its characters.

Moving further and further away from the canonical version of the story, we arrive at our final version of Tom Bombadil’s song. This one was inspired by a killer tweet (back when there were such things) from 2021, and is proof that sometimes, when you imagine something sufficiently silly, someone on the internet will take the time to make it real.

And so, with a hearty cry of “OLD FATTY LUMPKIN! OLD FATTY LUMPKIN! OLD FATTY LUMPKIN!” I bid you farewell, until our next exploration of Tolkien fan art.